Understand marketing contacts

If your Marketing Hub subscription includes marketing contacts, you can choose which contacts you'll be billed for. Below, learn more about marketing contacts and how you can use them in HubSpot. For answers to frequently asked marketing contacts questions, check out the marketing contacts FAQ.

• Marketing contacts: contacts that are set as marketing will count towards your contact tier. HubSpot tools can market to these contacts. Contacts cannot be set as marketing then non-marketing in the same month.
• Non-marketing contacts: contacts that are set as non-marketing will not count towards your contact tier. HubSpot tools cannot market to these contacts. Contacts cannot be set as marketing then non-marketing in the same month.

Check your access to marketing contacts

Even if your HubSpot account has a Marketing Hub subscription, you may not have access to marketing contacts. To check whether your Marketing Hub subscription includes marketing contacts:

• In your HubSpot account, click your account name in the top right corner, then click Account & Billing.

• Under Products & Add-ons, check whether your Marketing Hub subscription shows Marketing Contacts.

If you don't have access to marketing contacts but would like to, reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

Tools that only work with marketing contacts

The following marketing tools in your HubSpot account will only work with marketing contacts:

• Marketing emails, including follow-up emails after form submissions
• Contact list audiences in the ads tool
• Marketing actions in workflows, such as Send email and Add to or Remove from ads audiences.

Learn how you can set a contact as marketing.

Please note: other types of emails can still reach your non-marketing contacts, including sales one-to-one emails, chat transcript emails from conversations, registration emails, ticket kickback emails, transactional emails, and customer feedback surveys.

Marketing contact properties

• Marketing contact until next update: indicates if the contact will become a marketing or non-marketing contact upon the next update date.
  • When it is Yes, the contact will be set as a non-marketing contact on the next update date.
  • When it is left blank, the contact will remain as it is.
• Marketing contact status: indicates if the contact is currently a marketing or non-marketing contact.
  • When it is Marketing contact, the contact is a marketing contact and will count towards your contact tier in this period.
  • When it is Non-marketing contact, the contact is a non-marketing contact and will not count towards your contact tier in this period.
• Marketing contact status source type: indicates the tool that set the latest value in the contact's marketing contact status.
• Marketing contact status source name: indicates the ID of the specific activity that set the latest value in the contact's marketing contact status.

Learn how to check a contact record's property value.

Set contacts as marketing and non-marketing

When you don't intend to market to a certain contact, learn how to preemptively set them as non-marketing so they don't count towards your contact tier.

You may decide to market to a contact that was previously set as non-marketing. Learn how to set them as marketing so you can use HubSpot marketing tools with them. Once a contact is deemed as a marketing contact, they cannot be set as non-marketing within the same month.

You can also prevent other users from setting contacts as marketing.

Default marketing contact status for HubSpot  tools

Contacts can be created by different HubSpot tools, such as forms and chatflows. These tools have a default marketing contact status for the contacts they create.

Learn the default marketing contact status for these tools and how you can update the default marketing contact statuses for some of them.